Neil Gaiman's Unreleased Novel Picked Up By Hollywood

Neil Gaiman, well-known novelist, screenwriter and comic-book author, has had his yet-to-be-released novel already picked up by Focus Features.

Deadline reports that Focus Features and Playtone partners Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman are closing a deal to obtain Gaiman's novel The Ocean At The End of the Lane, due for release in June. Atonement, Anna Karenina and Pride and Prejudice director Joe Wright will helm.

The Ocean At The End of the Lane is described by the book's publishers (as reported on Gaiman's own blog) as "a novel about memory and magic and survival, about the power of stories and the darkness inside each of us.

"It began for our narrator forty years ago when he was seven: the lodger stole the family's car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and a menace unleashed -- within his family, and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it.

"His only defense is three women, on a ramshackle farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is an ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang.

"The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a fable that reshapes modern fantasy: moving, terrifying and elegiac -- as pure as a dream, as delicate as a butterfly's wing, as dangerous as a knife in the dark."

Gaiman himself describes it as "an astonishingly personal sort of a novel," and not "really a book for children." Another of Gaiman's books, American Gods, is currently being turned into a series by HBO, and film adaptations of his graphic novel series Sandman and children's fantasy The Graveyard Book are also in the works.

Sound good to you? Sounds good to us.

Lucy O'Brien is Assistant Editor at IGN AU, and she reckons this news is just swell. Follow her on IGN at Luce_IGN_AU,or @Luceobrien on Twitter.